Category Archives: Prejudices and “Intuitions”

The West within the rest

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by in Death, Metaphilosophy, Modern Hinduism, Politics, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Vedas and Mīmāṃsā, Western Thought

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In the previous post I discussed why academic philosophers have usually focused on the West, and pointed out reasons why some amount of Western focus remains valuable. Above all, I noted: “we are always already formed by some sort of philosophical tradition, whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not. And a great deal of what forms us is Western.” So exploring Western philosophy is important to understand our own thought better, where we are coming from.

There are at least two important objections to be made to that claim as I have phrased it. Continue reading →

Why philosophy departments have focused on the West

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Asian Thought, Health, Hermeneutics, Islam, Metaphilosophy, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Western Thought

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Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden have a widely circulated article in a recent New York Times, chastising American philosophy departments for paying insufficient attention to non-Western traditions of thought. It will surprise nobody that I sympathize with them, since I’ve been trying to get non-Western thought a hearing for years. But in part for that reason, I’ve also been thinking a lot about why it hasn’t got that hearing so far. The reasons for this are not all bad ones, and anyone working to change the situation needs to understand what those reasons are. Perhaps most importantly, they need to ask a vital question that I don’t see asked in Garfield and Van Norden’s article: why should we study philosophy? Continue reading →

Of drowning children, near and far (II)

18 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Family, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Shame and Guilt

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Last time, I observed Peter Singer’s proposed radical revision of our moral views – the claim that, when we keep money that we could give to help the starving or diseased without major sacrifice, we are doing something as bad as if we let a drowning child drown. Is Singer right?

At the heart of Singer’s argument, by his own reckoning, is this principle: “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” He explicitly states that the implication of this “ought” is duty and obligation, not merely charity and generosity. It is not just that sacrificing one’s own comfort and pleasure to help those in need is good, but that any refusal to do so is bad, something deserving of one’s own guilt and shame and others’ condemnation.

Now on what grounds should we accept this principle, if indeed we should? Continue reading →

Of drowning children, near and far (I)

04 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Generosity, Human Nature, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Shame and Guilt

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The image of a drowning child is a vivid one – enough to make it a key example in two very different traditions of moral philosophy. In ancient China, Mencius used the image to illustrate humans’ natural inborn moral benevolence: we would all “have a feeling of alarm and compassion” at such a sight, and not out of any form of self-interest. Thousands of years later, in the early 1970s – when Chinese philosophy was known to the West but it would rarely have occurred to a Western philosopher that he should study it – the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer used the same image. In his famous article “Famine, affluence and morality”, written in 1971 and published 1972, Singer says this:

if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.

But Singer puts the image to a very different use than Mencius. Continue reading →

Śabda and the sciences

12 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Faith, Foundations of Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Sāṃkhya-Yoga

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One of the key debates in Indian philosophy is what counts as a pramāṇa: an instrument of knowledge, a “reliable warrant”, a means of knowledge reliable enough that one can be reasonably confident to take its conclusions as true. What counts as a pramāṇa? Many Indian philosophers will provide a numbered list of them.

In the empiricist tradition that remains popular in the West, boosted by the discoveries of natural science, only experience is admitted as a pramāṇa: to a full-blown empiricist, nothing counts as knowledge if it doesn’t ultimately have its roots in experience, based in some sort of direct perception. (Ken Wilber’s thought has come to take this position more and more over the years, to its detriment.) The debate over pramāṇas in modern Western philosophy is often framed as one between empiricism and rationalism. That is, where empiricists admit only experience as a pramāṇa, rationalists also allow reasoning an independent validity: some things can be rationally known a priori, independently of sense experience.

Some Indian philosophers have agreed with these views. Continue reading →

First principles of paradigms

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by in Dialectic, Economics, Epistemology, Health, Logic, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Social Science

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There are two different ways to apply the distinction between dialectical and demonstrative argument, and it’s important to be aware of the difference. I draw the terms dialectical and demonstrative argument from Alasdair MacIntyre in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (pages 88-9), who in turn takes the distinction from Boethius‘s De topicis differentiis and ultimately from Aristotle’s Topics. The key point is that dialectical argument argues to first principles, and demonstrative argument from first principles.

But what are those first principles? Are they first principles for knowledge in general, or merely first principles within a single paradigm? Continue reading →

The No True Fish fallacy

25 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Biology, Early and Theravāda, Foundations of Ethics, Logic, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions"

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Consider this dialogue:

A: “All fish breathe through gills rather than lungs.”

B: “But whales are fish, and they breathe through their lungs.”

A: “Whales may look and seem like fish, but they aren’t truly fish because they breathe through their lungs.”

To anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of biology, A’s reasoning here must seem sound. Yet among some philosophers with a scientific bent, the structure of the reasoning A employs is often criticized as a logical fallacy. Continue reading →

The importance of assumptions

22 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, German Tradition, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Roman Catholicism

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Michael Reidy and the recently returned Thill raise an important point in response to last week’s post, on the assessment of philosophy from analytic and “continental” perspectives. I argued that analytic philosophy judges philosophical on argument and continental philosophy on the depth of interpretation – interpretation “that could explain not merely what Kant [for example] said, but why he said it.”

Michael responded that the two were not likely to be so far apart in practice: “You can hardly develop a credible problematique without knowing some details.” Thill responded that this depth of interpretation necessarily “involves also an explanation of Kant’s argument for his views or claims!!!… What else could ‘why he said it’ mean or refer to?”

Thill’s question appears to be intended as rhetorical (especially given the laughs that precede and follow it in his comment). But it shouldn’t be. Continue reading →

Of the plausibility or reliability of “common sense”

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Cārvāka-Lokāyata, Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Philosophy of Science, Prejudices and "Intuitions", South Asia, Truth

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This week, another foray into the debate over “common sense.” Apologies in advance to those readers who are not interested in this particular topic, or who will find this post’s precision rough going. Common-sense advocate Thill has been by far this blog’s most prolific commenter, and I think advancing the debates in the comments requires taking his views on directly and systematically. Moreover, I think the topic is an important one in its own right. The claims made by Thill, Jabali108, Neocarvaka and Ramachandra1008 in their comments, if they were true, would rule out the vast majority of South Asian philosophical thought (and a great more besides): probably all the philosophy originating in the subcontinent except for the shadowy Cārvāka-Lokāyata school of thought. Only the Cārvākas can be thought to completely exclude “religious” ideas from their worldview; but there is little if anything left to be learned from this school now, since all we have from them is the scantest of fragments. (The only surviving complete text attributed to a Cārvāka is Jayarāśi’s Tattvopaplavasiṃha, which these commenters have already dismissed as not really a Cārvāka text.) If South Asian thought is worth bothering with at all, then we’ll need to defend those conceptions of the world that are in some respects at odds with various elements of “common sense” – which, according to Thill, excludes all “religion.” Continue reading →

Is common sense merely plausible?

10 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by in Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Truth

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This week I’m going to continue the discussion of “common sense” from two weeks ago. I think it’s an important discussion because an overreliance on the concept of “common sense” can be (and seems to have been repeatedly) used to challenge the value and viability not merely of “religion” but of philosophy itself. I’m going to assume that readers of this current post have read that previous post – but not that they have read the comments on it, which have been the most numerous of any post on this blog so far (a full hundred!)

In those comments I challenged Thill to define the term “reliable,” which he had previously introduced to the discussion. I structured the post around the term “reliable” because in Thill’s previous comment, it had been at the centre of his only serious response to the point that “common sense” can be wrong (as in the case of sunrise and sunset). He said: “The fact that it is not infallible does not support the conclusion that it is not reliable!” No doubt I should have probed the definition of “reliable” further in the post – examining what Thill could have meant by it; I did not. I tried to make up for that lack in a later comment, where I asked Thill to define “reliable.” Thill responded that the onus was on me to define “reliable” since I had advanced a thesis relating to it; but my supposed thesis was intended as a response to his own thesis about the reliability of common sense, a word which, again, he introduced to the discussion. So I noted that I am happy to drop the term from the discussion as long as he, too, is willing to refrain from using the term “reliable” to refer to the epistemological status of so-called common sense. (That also applies to the others, Jabali108 and Neocarvaka, who have been exalting “common sense” in recent discussions.)

If we drop “reliable,” where are we left? Continue reading →